Lace (28 page)

It all looked so pretty that Elizabeth couldn’t understand why Felix wasn’t his usual cheerful self. He sat with his head turned away from the railway corridor, biting his lip,
silent and trembling. Though he looked out of the window, he didn’t seem to see the flat golden fields of wheat or the lake where placid fishermen sat in flat-bottomed punts and willow trees
trailed their branches in the water.

Angelina tugged at Elizabeth’s cotton dress as they passed pale gray towers and battlements rising above the trees. “We’re nearly there, let me comb your hair. . . .”

At Sopron, Uncle Sandor was waiting for them on the platform, waving his whip in recognition. He was dark and fiercely handsome, like a gypsy, with even longer mustachios than his brother Felix.
After bear-hugs of welcome, they climbed onto the flat-bottomed, dusty red farm cart. An hour’s ride lay ahead of them, through poplar-lined, shady roads that cut through field after field of
ripening grapevines.

They reached the farmhouse as dusk fell over the low building. Vanilla-scented pink and white oleander bushes grew along the whitewashed walls, long strings of dark red peppers were hung to dry
outside the kitchen window, dogs barked as the wagon wheels creaked to a halt. Grandma Kovago rushed into the yard, wiping her hands on her white apron, then drew the children into the lamplit
kitchen where thin, bent Grandpa Kovago, wearing a collarless open shirt and frayed black suit, waited to greet them.

On the wall opposite the kitchen door hung a tambourine, three old shotguns and several gilt-framed pictures in which crudely coloured saints rolled their eyes toward the ceiling. Two
nineteenth-century sepia portraits of the Empress Elizabeth gazed seriously into the lamplight. The kitchen table was set with wooden platters and huge earthenware crocks of food. A sour smell of
cheese, spices and rough wine hung over the low room. Black hams hung from the smoke-stained rafters, along with strings of sausages and ropes of dried mushrooms.

When the women were putting the children to bed and for the first time Felix found himself alone with his father, the old man’s amiability was abrupty discarded.

“Why have you come back, Felix? How dare you take such a fearful risk—not only for yourself but for your wife and the children!”

Felix was silent. It had been a hard decision. Three months before, after receiving the smuggled message from his mother, he had sweated at the thought of the danger he was running into. As a
war refugee, Felix hadn’t been granted Swiss citizenship and was in no position to apply for a Hungarian passport. It would have been an insane risk for him even to go to the Hungarian
consulate in Berne and make inquiries about the possibility of visiting his homeland. Not only had Felix fought against the Russians in the Hungarian army, but also in the German army. When Felix
consulted the Hungarian anti-Communist exile group in Geneva they told him he could expect to be arrested at the frontier and sent to a labour camp for twenty years—if he was lucky!

But after some argument, the group eventually agreed to provide Felix with the necessary forged documentation, and it was agreed that he would cross the border with his Swiss wife and two Swiss
children to strengthen his story of a family visit.

So far, in spite of his fright, the scheme had worked successfully. In the lamplit kitchen, he lifted his head and for the first time he addressed his father man-to-man, and not as an amiable
son.

“You know why I’ve come back, Papa. Because Mama sent for me. Because you’re . . . not going to live forever . . . And we all know it. I came back to see you both for the . . .
once more . . . And I came back because Mama wants me to get Sandor out. That’s why I’ve come back, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Does Angelina know?”

“No. Because she’s safer not knowing.”

“Does Sandor know?”

“Not yet, for the same reason.”

There was a silence, then the old man sighed and said, “You’re a brave boy and I’m proud of you, but you’re foolish, and your foolishness makes me angry because of the
danger.”

For the next two weeks the children lived the pleasant, pastoral Hungarian life that had changed little since medieval days. They rode bareback, swam in the lake and gathered
berries from the hedges to make jelly. In the brackish wet soil of the woods they picked thick, fat mushrooms beaded with dew and as big as a baby’s fist.

They practiced acrobatics on the trampoline that Uncle Sandor dragged out of the stable, and he tossed, caught and instructed the two children as they leaped and turned on the canvas.
Elizabeth’s small, thin frame obeyed Sandor’s every shouted command, and she continued to sail through the air long after Roger had become bored and wandered off to the stables. The two
children went for short walks with Grandpa Kovago or long walks through the forest with Uncle Sandor, who carried their lunch in a basket strapped to his back. One day they even went as far as the
Austrian border, which lay northwest of their farm. As they sprawled on a hilltop, eating smoked sausage, Elizabeth was a little disappointed. She had expected to see a thick red line wandering as
far as the eye could see—as it did on the maps at school—but no red line led through the forests of pine that covered the hillside.

Wherever they looked outside the farm, rows of vines stretched to the horizon. They weren’t waist height like Swiss vines, but were trained around twenty-foot-high poles, and they looked
like rows of green-leafed wigwams. When harvesting started, Angelina worked in the fields with the other women pickers, propping a fifteen-foot-high ladder against the vines in order to reach the
topmost branches. The burly male supervisor moved slowly along the lines, stooping with the weight of the big wooden container that was strapped to his back. As he passed each woman, he stopped
while she tipped her bucket into the container on his back. When it was full, he climbed up the ladder that was propped against the open truck and leaned over so that the grapes fell from his
container and over his head onto the golden, growing pile of fruit in the truck.

One evening Elizabeth triumphantly dashed up to Felix and threw her arms around him. “I’ve been practicing all day! I can do a backward somersault off the farmyard
gate and onto the trampoline!”

“You can?”

“Well, I
almost
can.”

“Either you can or you can’t, Lili. Stick to yes and no; can or can’t; did or didn’t; will or won’t; good or bad. Everyone knows what black and white is, but gray
can be anywhere in between, so stick to black and white, miss. Now, let’s see that somersault.”

That evening the two brothers walked down to the local
csarda
, two miles distant, to meet the men they had known since boyhood. Walking back in the moonlight after a lot of gossip and far
too much white wine, Sandor suddenly said, “Felix, I must admit I thought you were a fool to have left Hungary, a fool to risk coming back—most of all, a fool to have left the farm to
me. But now I’m not so sure.”

“Why not?” asked Felix, guardedly. “Everything looks as good as it ever did, the grapes grow, the sun shines, the children play.”

“Felix, you’ve never been able to see more than what’s under your nose.” Sandor stumbled. “Nothing’s wrong with God’s weather, the trouble is
man’s tyranny. Under the surface, Felix, things in Hungary are getting worse.
You
haven’t felt the fear in the cities.
You
don’t notice that everyone is shabby and
everything is in short supply.
You
don’t notice that men have been taken off the farms to work in the new factories, so farms are producing less because now farming takes second
place.”

Sandor stopped on the moonlit road and with an exaggerated, tipsy gesture, he started checking off on his fingers. “Farming takes second place to the coal industry, the chemical industry,
the bauxite and the dye industry. The Russians send raw materials here to be processed and manufactured in Hungary, then it’s nearly all sent back to Russia and our workers have nothing to
show for their work. All the farm produce is collected by the state and a lot of the food is sent out of the country, so there isn’t much incentive for farmers to produce it in the first
place—but if there isn’t enough food to collect, then a farmer might suddenly be thrown into prison.”

“But who’s to know, Sandor, if you sell a pig or a goose?”

“If you’re caught selling one goose on the black market, you can get a seven-year sentence. What I’m telling you is that, slowly, we are becoming Russian slaves.”

They walked in silence along the moonlit road, then Sandor added, “Janos the schoolmaster says that the newspapers and radio are censored and most of the new books and plays are just crude
Soviet propaganda.”

“Nothing new about that, Sandor.”

“No, but Janos says that even the Communist intellectuals in Budapest have now started to criticise the harshness of the Russian system. See what I mean?” He stumbled again.
“Hungarian
Communists
are criticizing the Soviet Union.”

“Very healthy.”

“The Russians won’t allow it. The secret police get more powerful every day.” He hung one arm around his brother’s shoulder. “Back in June, Miklos the blacksmith
got drunk in the
csarda
one night and said more or less what I’ve just told you. Next afternoon the secret police turned up in a car, shoved Miklos into it and headed back toward
Budapest.”

He suddenly stood still in the moonlight, remembering. “Nobody knows what’s happened to him, but someone said he was being taken to the
Avo
headquarters at Andrassy Street and
everybody knows that number sixty Andrassy is where the
Avos
have their torture chambers, so we don’t expect to see Miklos again. I tell you, if it wasn’t for the farm and the
old couple, I’d leave with you after the wine festival.”

Felix kept his plans to himself as they clumped along in the peaceful moonlight. He simply observed, “Farmers never starve if they keep their mouths shut.”

Vendors wandered among the tents pitched around the
csarda
tempting the peasants to buy their strings of pork sausages, cakes and sweetmeats. Inside the tents, a brisk
trade flourished in hats, dresses, ornaments, pots and pans, scythes and other agricultural implements. The evening before, the land around the
csarda
had been covered only with grass, but
now it was jammed with brightly dressed peasants in their Sunday best, celebrating the
szuret
, today’s wine festival. Some of the women wore as many as twenty-five petticoats under
green or scarlet skirts that reached to the top of their soft, scarlet leather boots; their white organdy blouses were richly embroidered, and so were their little waistcoats.

Early that morning the women had made a huge wreath of grapes mixed with wild flowers and bound it with coloured ribbons. This wreath had been carried in state from the vineyards to the village,
followed by a gypsy orchestra that fiddled merrily in front of the parade of vineyard workers. Jostling along in the happy, noisy procession, Elizabeth and Roger passed slowly through the town
until they reached the
csarda
, where, like everybody else, they drank a glass of pale, golden wine before the feasting started. Then the gypsy leader flung his dark head back and very slowly
drew his bow across the strings of his fiddle. One by one the other instruments joined in until the music grew louder and louder, faster and faster, more and more insistent. Soon boots were
kicking, skirts whirling, arms twirling as dancers spun with uninhibited shouts of joy.

“No other nation can dance like Hungarians,” shouted Uncle Sandor, pulling Angelina up to dance. “Dancing is in our blood and nothing can stop us.”

Very different from the quiet, staid Swiss, thought Elizabeth, her eyes as big as eggcups, as she watched the whirling skirts, the flying dark hair, the flashing eyes of the dancers.

“Come on, Lili, I’ll show you how to dance,” cried Felix, grabbing her hand and running forward. In an open-necked, white shirt with huge billowing sleeves, a scarlet
cummerbund, black open waistcoat and tight black trousers thrust into high scarlet leather boots, he looked wonderfully dashing. Felix tugged her toward the dancers, then suddenly stopped, hobbled
a couple of steps, stopped again and winced.

“Damned if I can. My foot’s throbbing. You’ll have to wait for Sandor.”

So Elizabeth stamped and whirled and twirled with Uncle Sandor, while Felix limped to a bench, took off his right boot and winced as Angelina examined his foot. “It was a mosquito bite
that I scratched; now it’s septic. Nothing to make a fuss about.”

He didn’t want a mosquito bite to spoil the fun of the
szuret
so he painfully squeezed on his boot again, ignored his throbbing foot and contented himself with watching the dancers
instead of joining in. But that evening Felix rode back to the farm with the women on the horse-drawn cart.

Angelina bathed his foot in the tin basin, while Grandma Kovago prepared the bread poultice. Grandfather ridiculed Angelina’s suggestion of a doctor. The gnarled old man took the black
pipe out of his mouth and laughed. “For a mosquito bite?” The gold watchchain that looped across his little belly wobbled with mirth.

The next day Felix sat outside the kitchen door. Swathed in white linen, his foot was propped on a chair seat. But by evening his leg had started to throb and the following morning Felix could
hardly walk.

Angelina insisted on consulting a doctor, so Sandor set off for Sopron on horseback. By evening when the doctor arrived, Felix was sweating, with a high temperature, unable to move without
pain.

“Blood poisoning. He needs penicillin, not bread poultices,” growled the doctor, frowning over spectacles pulled halfway down his nose at the swollen, purple-red foot.
“You’re going to be in bed for a couple of weeks at least. If you’re lucky.”

So Angelina wrote a letter to Herr Pangloss, the manager of the Hotel Rosat, to say that Felix could not return until the end of October. But there was no cause for alarm. After all, it was
merely a mosquito bite.